Coasting in class

I recently received a though provoking comment on an earlier blog post. Here's the second half of the comment asking about my flipped classroom teaching: "As each year begins, do you have formal discussions with students to strategize how to learn and assimilate new material independently?"

The answer is yes.

The students who enter my classroom have never experienced learning the way I ask them to. I have to spend multiple classes teaching, in the old style, how to learn in this new style. (Although I have created a series of videos that explain how my class works. I send them to students and parents in the summer before school even begins. Some of them even watch them!)

It does not come easily to the students. By the time they've reached my classroom they've already had 6-8 years of schooling in the traditional style. They've already got some pretty ingrained habits and expectations about what school is and how it works.

I typically end up seeing three groups of students.

Group 1. These students love the subject. They're already good at it. In the traditional classroom they are bored out of their minds because they have to wait for the rest of the class to catch up. In my class they are free to move as fast as they can. They rise to the challenge and love it.

Group 2. These student struggle with the subject. It is hard for them, they often hate it and think they can't do it. They've already spent years struggling to keep up. At first they will often have a hard time with this new way of learning. But at some moment they realize that they can watch the video lesson 3 times over if they want to, they can ask me a hundred questions, have me do 20 examples with them, redo work they don't get yet, and they don't have to take a test until they feel they are ready to. Once this gets into their heads, they love it. It doesn't make the subject easier, but it makes it possible.

The final group is the one that I have the most trouble with.

You see Group 3 is pretty good at the subject, maybe even really good at it. They've spent the last bunch of years, showing up in class, sitting there listening to the teacher, picking up enough in class that they can pass the test. They don't need to do any homework, or anything else really. They just show up and wait.

In my class they do horribly. See, they have to go and get the learning, they can't coast because I check every question, and they don't get to write any tests until they've actually done all the work and studied every topic. It's up to them to get the work done. They have to engage and work and keep up. These students inevitably end up falling behind and I get to have conversations with their parents about doing homework every night. Some of them end up being made by their parents to do math homework over Christmas break in order to get back on track. This is also the group who's parents get the most upset with me as a teacher.

You see, one of the most important things our students can learn is the skill of how to learn on your own. So, I build my classroom to encourage this. If you want to learn you can, but you're the one who has to do the work, not me.